Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?
We just had an AI boom and now my computer can write text and code. It can generate images, voices and music almost as well as a human. This is in the last two years, I don’t understand the feeling. I was personally blown away the first times I used things like chatgpt, stable diffusion, elvenlabs and udio.
My current phone has less utility than the phone I had in 2018, which had a headphone jack, SD card, IR emitter (I could use it as a TV remote!), heartrate sensor, and a decent camera.
My current laptop is less upgradable than pretty much anything that came out in 2010. The storage uses a technically standard but uncommon drive size, and the wifi and RAM are both soldered on. It is faster and has a nicer screen, but DRMs in web browsers make it hard to take advantage of that screen, and bloated electron apps make it not feel much faster.
Oh but here’s the catch! Now, thanks to a significant amount of stolen data being used to train some autocorrect, my computer can generate code that’s significantly worse than what I can write as a junior software dev with under a year of job experience, and takes twice as long to debug. It can also generate uncanny valley level images that look about like I typed in a one sentence prompt to get them.
Buying shit products doesn’t mean technology isn’t advancing. My phone still has all the things you said and it was one of the cheaper models. Talking about sd cards, a 500 gb one is 20$. They didn’t even exist in that size a decade ago if I’m not mistake.
Is this about technology advancing or if it’s doing it morally? Your personal opinion on technology doesn’t change its merit. And seriously, if you can’t see the leaps and bound gen ai has done and how little of that uncanny feeling is left, you are just sitting there with your head in the sand.
Fact is, if I would have asked you three years ago how much time it will take for technology to advance to such a level where consumer computers can generate realistic images out of individual pixels, you would have straight up laughed at me. I bet you would have confidently told me it was impossible.
And if I asked you 2 years ago I bet you’d think LLMs would have gotten a lot better by now :)
If you think an AI can do those things almost as good as a human, you should find more capable humans to hang out with
If it was shit, people wouldn’t be complaining about having to compete with it.
It really depends on what we mean by “better than a human”. Can AI draw better then the average human, yes. Can AI draw better then the best 10% of artists, no.
In any case, this is a tool. It helps me make up for the skills I don’t have either to entertain me or help me. It just needs to be better then the human I can afford to hire, but I’m broke so the bar is low tbh.
And let’s be honest too, the average human is kind of shit at most things, half of America can’t even think for itself apparently, the bar isn’t very high on what they can do either.